Every six months our two BOS furnaces need to be fully re-bricked.
We use these scheduled maintenance windows to do a range of repairs or preventative maintenance on the furnace auxiliary systems.
This time round, the team saw an opportunity to reduce the risk of SIMOPs (that’s simultaneous operations, which can see one work group wait around and waste man hours another work group is still completing tasks), through better planning.
The Steel Making Maintenance Campaign Team took the time to consider how previous campaigns had been run and looked for opportunities to do things better. They then developed and implemented corrective measures early in the execution phase, that would ensure the program run ahead of schedule from the onset of the campaign.
Core to their success was ensuring that the timing of activities associated to the critical path be maintained or optimized throughout the campaign, which ultimately prevented “bottleneck” activities from occurring, and meant that no one was left waiting around.
The BOS #1 furnace maintenance campaign in January was completed 24 hours earlier than schedule as a result.
A huge well done to the team for turning this around! Not only did they finish ahead of schedule, but they saved about 1600 hours and safely ran the campaign without SIMOPs, setting a new benchmark for future campaigns.